• Creative Writing •
• Original Poetry •
Poetry Competition Shortlist: “I start to understand yellow”
I start to understand yellow
(For Grand-Maman)
when I unfold your recipe for soufflé and feel the sweetness of brittle paper.
Rosehill, Mauritius, 1938. These ingredients are not possible.
Verna lemons, Suffolk eggs. It’s all right. I understand; only the sugar
made sense on the plantation between Floreal and Beau Bassin.
Some said Grand Papa loved the east side of the island and the stretch
of water facing Rodrigues, across the Arabian Sea to Goa.
It all started there with his curious, grey-eyed mother.
Others said he was a bastard who pissed away everything in a poker shack
with a mulatto woman from north of Souillac.
No-one told her, when he burst through the windscreen of his Jensen
On a skin-full of Green Island, when the moon was less than.
For fourteen nights she sat with a bundle of children, on a grass hill
outside Floreal and each night GrandMaman passed silent silver
casuarinas, holding a warm clay dish of chicken and cardamom rice.
Rosemary Shepperd was shortlisted for the Oxonian Review Poetry Competition 2012
